Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

So I can't tell you from experience, but I can say that it's fairly safe to assume that probably, yes, it was more common for people to smell like smoke.

But we also very easily habituate to smells that we're around a lot.

It doesn't take very long at all, really only about 30 seconds for us to habituate to a smell.

Like even the worst kind of smells, you know, like a pigsty or whatever.

So long as the smell isn't shifting and changing or coming and going, we just stop noticing a smell, basically.

So if you're in a room where people are smoking, you will pretty much just get used to it after not very long.

My colleague Will Tullett has done some really interesting work on cafes and salons and smoking and has traced,

when smoking became a kind of more communal experience, why the fact that gender's mixing in these public spaces meant that smoking became less popular because women who weren't used to the smell would complain about it.

There's a great deal of work on stigmatisation and smoking as it relates to smell and how people who smoke are very often

represented as being foul smelling and disgusting and they have decaying teeth and yellow fingers and that kind of thing.

And then it certainly does in some ways lead to a kind of moral stigmatization of something that is in most cases not moral.

There is a kind of argument to be made for it affecting other people because it's a kind of a

behavior that's associated with poor health as we were saying before smell is deeply deeply emotionally associative and so if you have positive emotional associations with smoking which you you very well might if you had say a grandparent that smoked or a parent that smoked then it can be you know a very comforting thing to smell i was thinking about the parent trap

Both the book and the film at the end where I think it's Hallie hugs her grandfather and says that she's making a memory.

Every time I think about my grandfather.

I'll remember that he smelled like pipe tobacco and peppermint.

I think there's a distinction between tobacco and cigarettes.

And then there's also, of course, online, this kind of big discussion always being had about the difference between cigarette smoke and weed smoke.

Well, I mean, affordable perfumes are still a relatively recent invention.

Not so much as an invention, but I suppose a commodity that is actually available to the kind of average consumer.